Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret". He is on Twitter as HolySmoke. His latest book is The Fix: How addiction is taking over your world. He also writes about classical music for The Spectator.

Welcome to misery tourism – a Gap Yah for Lefties

Picture the scene. Residents of Tripoli cower in fear as gunmen spray bullets into the sky. Their AK-47s drown out the moans of a man who lies bleeding on the pavement. Next to him stands a youth in a T-shirt, jumping from one foot to another in a state of feverish excitement. He’s shouting at the man to keep still, and he’s pointing something in his face. But it’s not a gun. It’s an iPhone.

Meanwhile, 5,000 miles away, New York police have lost patience with Occupy Wall Street. Chanted slogans turn into girly shrieks as cops squirt Mace in protesters’ eyes and push them up against a barricade. The scene is witnessed by a young British woman – small, bustling, self-important – who taps angry tweets into a mobile phone before rushing back to her hotel to write a blog post.

Welcome to misery tourism, a sort of Gap Yah for well-heeled Lefties. Just as cheap flights enabled working-class Brits to descend on the Costa del Sol in the early 1970s, so information technology enables self-styled “activists” and “photo-journalists” to flit from trouble spot to trouble spot. Passport? Check. Smartphone? Check. Loan from mummy and daddy? Check. Congratulations: you’re a humanitarian.

Some of these kids take serious risks, though they may be unaware of the fact until they find themselves caught in the middle of a gunfight and in need of new underwear.

According to the New York Times, “hundreds of photographers from around the world flocked to the cities of Aldabiya, Benghazi and Misurata in the spring of 2011. Many of them were under 30 and under fire for the first time.”

A few of these will turn into serious war photographers and reporters. But others are just joyriders, sniffing the air for suffering, looking for something really awesome for their cool blog. The writers among them are hoping that the New Statesman will offer them a column. Until this summer they wanted to be the next Johann Hari; he’s no longer their role model, but they’ve absorbed his modus operandi, inserting conveniently neat quotes from oppressed peasants, wounded protesters, rape victims etc into their blog posts.

Actually, the queen of misery tourism has already got herself a perch at the New Statesman and is eyeing Johann’s empty seat at the Independent. (Rumour has it that he won’t be returning, but don’t get me started on that subject.) Laurie Penny, known as PennyRed on Twitter, combines unblinking dogmatism with little-girl vulnerability: think Rosa Klebb disguised as Audrey Tautou. Recently she treated herself to a trip to Occupy Wall Street, from where she sent back deliciously self-regarding dispatches: “A young woman with long hair is handing out posies. 'You’re very beautiful,’ she says, smiling, 'have a bottle of flowers.’ ”

Well, yes, Laurie, I’m sure you are very beautiful, and so are all the other groovy youngsters turning people’s grievances into digital entertainment. But great beauties can be heartless, and there’s something intrinsically cruel and self-indulgent about misery tourism.

Because that’s all it is. When you’ve finished screaming and screaming until you are sick, Violet Elizabeth Bott-style, boredom sets in. Goodness, is that the time? Like the Occupy London Stock Exchange campaigners outside St Paul’s, you wait until the cameras have gone and then you creep back home to snuggle under your duvet. But not before checking your laptop to make sure that your Facebook friends have “liked” your harrowing account of oppression and brutality.

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My colleague Tim Stanley is writing a book about Hollywood politics. I asked him how the Democrats of Tinseltown are enjoying the presidency of Barack Obama. “Not at all,” he said. “You see, he’s doesn’t care about them.” Celebs lurved Bill Clinton because they could identify with his dry-cleaning problems and he sucked up to them. But now? If that old witch Susan Sarandon (I refer, of course, to her role in The Witches of Eastwick) rings the White House to lecture the prez on healthcare, she doesn’t get put through. It’s not just that Obama is bored by her views. He’s bored by everyone’s views and by every aspect of his job. And, boy, does it show.

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I’ve never been moved by the Elgin Marbles, despite their grand setting in the British Museum. If they were all in one piece, they’d be breathtaking, but those missing heads spoil it for me.

On the other hand, I’ve always enjoyed the fits of self-righteous rage that our ownership of the marbles has provoked in modern Greeks. First, I’ve never believed that they’re the descendants of the people who carved the marbles. Second, I’ve never trusted Greek assurances that they’d look after them. At any rate, the whole debate is now academic. Far from returning the marbles, perhaps this is the time to take the whole Parthenon off their hands in return for our contribution to the bail-out. Think how splendid it would look in the middle of Bloomsbury.

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What with all this panic about overpopulation, it’s worth pointing out that this isn’t the first time the problem has reared its head. Seventy-five million years ago, the intergalactic dictator Xenu found that his empire of 90 planets was overcrowded with billions of creatures. So he dropped them down volcanos on planet Earth, where their invisible alien souls (“Thetans”) attached themselves to human bodies.

So, all things considered, I’m being rather brave by telling you all that stuff about Thetans and volcanos. And if you never see my byline again, you’ll know why.

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The resignation of Dr Giles Fraser as a canon of St Paul’s Cathedral is a peculiar business, when you think about it. No sooner had he departed than the building re-opened – and it seems unlikely that the Church will be implicated in any violence against the idiot protesters, which was apparently Fraser’s reason for quitting. In an interview with the Guardian he sounded muddled, evasive and – when he talked about imagining Jesus being born in the camp – like an Alan Bennett parody. Perhaps he has a new job lined up, in which case the plot just thickens. But one thing’s for sure: his family will have to leave the lovely 17th-century house that they had been redecorating. How does Mrs Fraser feel about that, I wonder?